Our adventures, stories and pictures.

Annual Photo Shoot

This year we did our Annual photo shoot at a YouStudios in Sydney. This is our third set of family portraits. I never thought I’d have an annual family picture, but it’s turned out to be a really fun tradition.

Early on a Saturday morning we got gussied up and filled a giant duffle bag with props before heading over to their studio. Unlike previous places we’ve gone, YouStudios likes to do the photos in three sessions: shoot, review, pick up. For our first shoot, we worked with a super awesome photog who had us get up, down, and in some cases up in the air. Xavier is normally super camera shy, but she did a great job of bringing him out of his shell and getting him to smile for the shots.

We ran through a few different sets of photos, including some sports photos of him in his soccer outfit. Back home, team photos are a pretty stock part of a kids sport. Down here I guess it’s not a thing.

About a week later we showed up again for the review session. We arrived back at the studio and spent 40 minutes or so going through the choice shots of the previous session, and discussing layout options. Unfortunately, we then had a talk about price — this is when we found out that we were not at the same sort of place we were used to. The first option our photographer showed us was comparable in cost to a new laptop. Yikes!!!

Considering we generally keep our walls bare, this was just so far out of the realm of reasonable we had to laugh.

After some negotiating, Sarah found a plan that worked for her and was within a reasonable price point for what we were looking for. As an upside, our package also included digital copies that we can email around to friends.